Recently I went out on a very cold day in January with my lovely fiancee to do a bit of test shooting in an effort to push around footage to create a series of Horror Film looks in DaVinci Resolve. While none of these a groundbreakingly interesting they do show how far you can push around a the SLOG3 files out of the Sony A6300.

The LOG file can be fairly jarring to look at untouched. I recently had a producer almost have a breakdown because I didn't adequately prepare them for the look of the raw footage. When you load up two days of shooting and everything is dark, grey, and noisy, it's a lot to take in. Especially when you've been looking at the internally corrected gamma on set.

In an attempt I tried a number of different methods to create an over all horror movie vibe. Each going with a different style, some inspired by great photographers others by moods.

The first look was inspired by some images I saw from Eduard Steichen, while I backed off how extreme that look is, the essence of the look is still there. His landscape work has an early dawn, loneliness which the cool greens definitely help inspire.

This second look was more of more of a faded photograph look. Much like old home photographs from the 70's or 80's after a few decades of fading.

This was much more of a contemporary Ring style look, cold and empty. This style most closely represents the weather we were filming in.

This last shot is attempting more of a ENR process with the pitch blacks and the blown out highlights. A slightly punchier Sepia look.

Each of these looks were just variations on a feeling I wanted to convey of foreboding or otherworldliness. I will put more up as I create it. This is my first real blog so I am going to try to be better that grotesquely sporadic about posting.

This is the trailer for Mistake Series. As cinematographer on this series on of my responsibility is the color grading. This video hows the sublte changes to a video to create the mood of the project. The trailer was graded in DaVinci Resolve from an H.264 file.

Behind the scenes

THis blog is insight on the projects as I shoot them.

I spend most of my time in talking to people about filmmaking and cinematography in general. I thought I could take this and bring it to the world as a whole to help inspire people to make great work. Having recently worked on a few larger projects and I hope to provide stories from the day. Perhaps some of the intent and inspiration as well. I am also going to use this as a way to shout out people I know that do amazing work. Hopefully people will also follow them as they do great things.